Review:
When Elise is first told that her old college friend Julie has gone missing, she doesn't believe it. Elise knows Julie better than anyone, and she's convinced that she has just temporarily gone off somewhere on her own and will turn up again soon, laughing at everyone's reaction to her supposed disappearance. Except a year goes by, and Julie's friends have a sort of funeral for her. Even to Elise, this seems a bit too long for some kind of game. Then, exactly two years after Julie went missing, she turns up again. She swears she's fine, but she has no memory of where she was.
In order to reconnect, Julie and her three closest friends, Elise, Mae, and Molly, decide to spend a weekend at a remote hotel in which each of the rooms is elaborately decorated according to some bizarre theme. Elise and the others are shocked at how emaciated and sick Julie looks, but their friendship has been built around knowing about but avoiding talking about terrible things, and so they privately worry about Julie but pretend like nothing's wrong when they're with her.
However, as hard as they try to pretend that everything's normal, it definitely isn't, and tensions are on the rise. It doesn't help that there seems to be something wrong with the hotel - Elise wonders whether her room is haunted, as she keeps imagining a presence there, just out of her line of sight, and she struggles to get the thermostat to stay above sixty. There's also something going on with the hotel staff, and the supposedly fully booked hotel is weirdly empty.
During the first 26 pages, I considered at least temporarily DNFing this and moving on to something that would maybe fit my mood better. I decided to keep going, although it was kind of boring, something about Elise really put me off, and relationship between her and her college friends didn't work for me at all. By that point, however, Julie had finally made an on-page appearance, and between her and the weird and possibly haunted hotel rooms, I was hooked.
Even though I was pretty sure I knew what was going on with Julie, her friends' insistence on not directly confronting her about anything meant that things were allowed to become steadily very, very bad. This was as much a book about friendship, specifically the friendship between these women, as it was about things that go bump in the night.
By the end, things got extremely intense, to the point that I saved the final confrontations and revelations for daylight. It was a surprisingly scary read. I'm still not really a fan of Harrison's characters, but I'm tempted to give another one of her horror novels a shot.
No comments:
Post a Comment